Rupert Richardson learned house cleaning from his mother and now builds his own apps
Rupert Richardson still cleans for families he first served beside his mother, and he now uses AI tools to build the software that runs his Essex County crew.
Newark, NJ
Rupert Richardson spends much of his workday behind the wheel. He picks up his employees, drops them at a client’s house and later drives them to the next one. “I don’t work in the field,” he says. “I let my employees do the job. I just pick them up and drop them off.”
There are exceptions. “There’s about eight houses that I have to be in there because they are so big and require so much work,” he says.
Richardson, the owner of Rupert Light Cleaning Solutions, learned the trade from his mother, who started cleaning houses when she was 16. He went to work beside her at 21, in the late 1990s, and some of the families the two of them cleaned for then are still his clients. The business rests on that kind of loyalty. What is newer is the way he runs it. Richardson builds his own software with AI tools to schedule his crew and handle the office side of the business.
He started the company in 2019. It is a New Jersey limited liability company, and it is small: Richardson and three employees, cleaning houses across most of Essex County, in towns such as Montclair, Glen Ridge, Verona and West Orange.
The long relationships show in the company’s earliest public reviews. Customers who wrote in 2019 and 2020 said he had been cleaning for them for nearly a decade, and in one case for more than 10 years. Some houses have stayed with him even after the people inside changed. William M. has used Richardson’s crew for years, as have his neighbors. He wrote in a Google review that the crew had also cleaned his house when the previous owner lived there.
The weekday routine is set out in a welcome packet for new clients. Crews work Monday through Friday. The first arrival window is 8 to 9 a.m., and the last is 3 to 4 p.m. The company brings its own supplies and equipment, except for three things the client provides: toilet brushes, kitchen sponges and trash can liners. New clients are asked to name any products they are allergic to, such as bleach, Ajax or oven cleaner, so it can go in their file. People with stone counters, marble floors or certain wood floors are asked to leave out the cleaner the manufacturer recommends. Otherwise the crew works with steam and Vital Oxide, a hospital-grade disinfectant made without bleach.
Office work is the exception to the weekday rule. “We clean dental offices on Saturdays,” Richardson says. All of his commercial accounts are weekly.
Real estate agents send him a steady stream of one-time jobs, deep cleans and move-out cleans for houses going on the market. A Montclair agent wrote that he and his team have prepared many of her listings. When Nadine P. was getting her own house ready to sell, she hired him on her agent’s advice. His crew deep cleaned the house while Richardson did the windows himself, all 27 of them, she wrote.
The software began with chatbots. Richardson has used ChatGPT since about 2023 and later added Anthropic’s Claude. “I have implemented AI in my business,” he says.
With Manus, an AI agent, he built an app that schedules his employees, so he does not have to pay another company for one. With Claude Code, a programming assistant, he built a second tool he calls his own financial advisor, made to know “about me and my business, not anything outside my business.” ChatGPT now has a narrower job. He uses it mostly to write the instructions he feeds the other tools.
Beyond the weekly houses, the company takes on move-in cleans, solar panels, dryer vents and pressure washing, and it washes exterior windows with a water-fed pole that reaches the second story from the ground. Richardson’s goal for it is plain. “The vision is to just continue growing and serving my client,” he says, “just making my client happy with our work.”
Some of those clients have been letting him in since he was 21, cleaning beside his mother.